Category: News
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VW’s make-or-break week — for the German parent and its Eastern Cape operation
Bloomberg Opinion’s Chris Bryant lays out the stakes as Volkswagen’s supervisory board confronts Chinese competition, a battered share price and pressure to shut German plants. The Porsche and Piech families, who control half of VW’s voting shares, have watched their investment implode to a fraction of what they paid for their stake in 2022. For…
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BN Daybreak: NATO Summit tension; AI stocks slump; Zuma’s Gupta meeting
Listen here Kyiv faces fresh Russian missile strikes ahead of the NATO summit in Turkey, while tensions linger following the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Meanwhile, OPEC+ quotas drop oil prices, Alibaba blocks a US blacklist order, and investors fret over an AI chip stock pullback. Locally, Jacob Zuma’s Gupta meeting and Cyril Ramaphosa’s controversial…
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Boardroom Talk: A R57bn handshake – How Chery cashed in on two subsidies
Cameras loved the Rosslyn ribbon-cutting on Friday. As did the controversial politicians Paul Mashatile and Panyaza Lesufi. The substance is thinner. Chery didn’t build a factory — it inherited Nissan’s ageing one – once listed on the JSEW as “Automakers” – promised to retain a few hundred existing workers, and dressed it all up as…
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Gabriel Makin: Why illegal immigration hurts Europe but helps SA
Illegal immigration is condemned everywhere, but does it do equal damage everywhere? Gabriel Makin of The Common Sense, who has lived in both South Africa and Europe, argues no. Drawing on Milton Friedman’s warning that free immigration and welfare states can’t coexist, and a Dutch study showing low-skilled non-Western migrants cost the fiscus roughly R5.5…
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Ian Bremmer on BizNews: Why a frustrated Putin is the world’s next big risk
Ian Bremmer warns that Vladimir Putin faces his tightest spot in 25 years in power — Russia controls the same 20% of Ukraine it did three years ago, casualties have hit staggering levels, and Ukraine is now striking deep inside Russia itself, even Moscow and Crimea. With growth forecast at just 0.5% for 2026 and…
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WSM: Going the full Prince Andrew: Steenhuisen’s self-immolating interview
William Saunderson-Meyer, one of our country’s sharpest political columnists, likens John Steenhuisen’s excruciating News24 interview to Prince Andrew’s career-ending Newsnight disaster — except, he argues, this one was deliberate. Writing on Politicsweb, WSM explains how Steenhuisen took aim at Tony Leon, his own mentor, and Geordin Hill-Lewis, the man who succeeded him as DA leader,…
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The Economist: Africa embraces Starlink (while SA politicians force poor second choice)
The Economist reports Starlink is transforming connectivity across Africa — from Nigerian hill towns to Zimbabwe and Kenya — offering speeds and coverage that legacy mobile and fibre networks can’t match, with a million African subscribers expected by early next year. South Africa is conspicuously absent from that success story. As Ivo Vegter details, Deputy…
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Max Hastings: Dreadnought moment – Why drones, not aircraft carriers, now decide wars
Max Hastings needs no introduction to anyone who has spent time in a military history section: former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard, decorated war correspondent who covered conflicts from Vietnam to the Falklands, and author of some 30 books on warfare, from Bomber Command to Vietnam to Ukraine’s current fight. Few living…
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SpaceX priced for perfection: Wall Street’s verdict lands next week
Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public on June 11 in the biggest IPO ever, and investors have been valuing it largely on faith ever since. That changes next week, when underwriting banks — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and others — finally publish research now that their quiet period has lifted. The numbers already look stretched:…
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The NdB Sunday Show – Lauren Evanthia: Zuma’s Gupta reunion, Cyril’s Pule problem, Intel boss’ secrets…
Listen here In the latest NdB Sunday Show Chris Steyn talks to Lauren Evanthia, the founder of the Organic Humanity Movement (OHM), about former President Jacob Zuma’s reunion with one of the Guptas in India in the presence of a South African diplomat, while South Africa is struggling to find the Guptas and extradite them…
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Paul Hoffman: Ramaphosa vows anti-corruption renewal, then puts Dina Pule back in cabinet
An analysis of South Africa’s coalition politics and corruption debate focuses on the controversial rehabilitation of Dina Pule, a former minister previously investigated for misappropriating public funds. The article argues that her return to government alongside DA-nominated ministers signals continued ANC tolerance of ethical lapses under President Cyril Ramaphosa. It links this to broader concerns…
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Paul Hoffman: Ramaphosa vows anti-corruption renewal, then puts Dina Pule back in cabinet
An analysis of South Africa’s coalition politics and corruption debate focuses on the controversial rehabilitation of Dina Pule, a former minister previously investigated for misappropriating public funds. The article argues that her return to government alongside DA-nominated ministers signals continued ANC tolerance of ethical lapses under President Cyril Ramaphosa. It links this to broader concerns…
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Paul Hoffman: Ramaphosa vows anti-corruption renewal, then puts Dina Pule back in cabinet
An analysis of South Africa’s coalition politics and corruption debate focuses on the controversial rehabilitation of Dina Pule, a former minister previously investigated for misappropriating public funds. The article argues that her return to government alongside DA-nominated ministers signals continued ANC tolerance of ethical lapses under President Cyril Ramaphosa. It links this to broader concerns…
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Paul Hoffman: Ramaphosa vows anti-corruption renewal, then puts Dina Pule back in cabinet
An analysis of South Africa’s coalition politics and corruption debate focuses on the controversial rehabilitation of Dina Pule, a former minister previously investigated for misappropriating public funds. The article argues that her return to government alongside DA-nominated ministers signals continued ANC tolerance of ethical lapses under President Cyril Ramaphosa. It links this to broader concerns…
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Six months on, the fire is still burning — KZN farmer Pete Kean counts the FMD cost | BizNews Edge
Listen here Six months ago, KwaZulu-Natal farmer Pete Keene came to BizNews with a warning nobody wanted to hear. His herd was a hundred percent infected with foot and mouth disease, the government’s response had a zero percent chance of working, and the law wouldn’t even let him reach for a needle and syringe. Today,…
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While Pretoria drafts Expropriation Bills, Rupert just hands out title deeds
Johann Rupert’s Reinet Foundation and Remgro have recapitalised Khaya Lam, the Free Market Foundation’s title deed project, pushing the total number of transfers past 24,000 since 2018. Municipal tenants — many holding apartheid-era occupancy rights with no mortgage value — become full title-holders through patient conveyancing work, turning what Hernando de Soto called “dead capital”…
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Socialist judge who engineered SA’s “transformationism” now cries foul over its results
Martin van Staden takes aim at retired judge Dennis Davis’s newly republished Democracy and Deliberation, which now admits South Africa’s constitutional order is drifting toward authoritarianism. Van Staden’s charge: Davis helped write the playbook. Decades of “transformationist” jurisprudence – treating the Constitution as a tool for social engineering rather than a limit on state power…
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Ian Cameron: Government’s drilling holes in the safety boat while asking citizens to help bail
DA MP Ian Cameron, who chairs the Parliamentary Committee on the SAPS, makes an uncomfortable point in the op-ed written for BizNews: SA’s real safety net isn’t SAPS alone — its private security, neighbourhood watches, farm watches and armed response, filling gaps the state can’t. Yet the government is pushing two measures that undercut exactly…
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The stream hits the wall: the uncertain future of great TV
By Carlos Amato With the streaming giants suddenly struggling to justify the cost of creative ambition, the golden age of the small screen might be behind us. But all is not lost. In 2016, I shared a workspace with a team of gifted TV screenwriters. I would eavesdrop hungrily on the 3-hour-long weekly script meetings…
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Sean Peche: What great investors know about forecasting the future
By Sean Peche* “Never extrapolate single data points” as my great friend and former colleague, Richard Pitt, used to tell me. Anyone with more than 5 minutes knowledge of statistics knows he’s right. Yet people do it all the time. The news channels all want to interview the strategist who “got it right last time”…